Easy Peasy (4 page)

A bulky envelope arrived two days later. I picked it up from the mat before Foxy could see. She is insatiably curious about mail and phone calls. Nosy bag, I call her. It's not that she's suspicious or jealous, she's just plain nosy.

Inside the envelope, there was a note written on blue paper and addressed to my mother, this was folded round a fat manila envelope stuck down with parcel tape. I read the note:

Dear Mrs Dawkins
,

My husband, the Rev. Priest, passed away three months ago. While going through his papers recently I came across the enclosed envelope, which, as you see, has your husband's name on it. I apologise for the delay in forwarding it to you. I have decided to send it to you rather than to Mr Dawkins directly as I know how sensitive some veterans are to the subject of their POW experience. Certainly my husband still suffered the scars – both physical and mental. Early on, I used to urge him to talk to me, or to remain in contact with fellow POWs, but to no avail. I wonder if your experience with Mr Dawkins was similar?

Sadly my husband died without, I believe, having addressed himself to the forgiveness of his Japanese captors. An oddness I think in a man otherwise so wholly Christian in outlook and behaviour
.

So, in accordance with what I believe my late husband's wishes to be, I enclose these papers and leave to your own discretion what you do with them next
.

With very best wishes
,

Yours sincerely
,

Mrs Anthea Priest

The brown envelope was thick, packed with papers. In faded ink I read my father's name written in fountain-pen by an elegant hand. I began to open it, my heart beating hard. My fingernail was under the edge of the brittle parcel tape when I heard Foxy's footfall in the hall, coming to see what the post was. I pushed the whole package into the bookcase.

‘What was it?' she said.

‘What?'

‘The post, I heard it come, anything for me?'

‘No. Just some Reader's Digest win-a-fortune sort of thing.'

‘Your lucky day then.' She poked me in the stomach with her finger and went back to work, grinning. If I'd shown her she would have ripped the envelope open and seen it all, explored it all. By nightfall she would have been full of plans for books and documentaries. She would have been on the phone to my father arranging an interview. I could not face it.

I had to go to an auction then, and driving on the motorway to Leeds gave me pause to consider. I did not open the envelope. I still have not, though my fingers have strayed to the corners where the tape is coming up; though I have often stroked the old faint grittiness of it and breathed its dusty smell.

I decided I would not open the envelope. It was not mine to open. No, I decided that I would give it to him. Not send: the thing appearing on the breakfast table, where Mummy always dumps the post, might come as too much of a shock, whatever its contents – which could, after all, be trivial. My plan was to take him out to lunch. Next month is, would have been, his birthday – his sixty-eighth. I have never had a meal only with Daddy, without Mummy there to smooth all the prickles, fill all the gaps. I thought I would take him out for lunch and if we sat in silence throughout the meal then so be it. But at lunch – a pub I thought, nowhere formal, somewhere with a fire and home cooking – I'd ease into the subject of the past and give him the envelope. I'd thought that maybe then he would confide in me, open up little by little. That I could learn his story not by sneaking behind his back into his private things but through his words, through what he chose for me to know. Because I am interested. Foxy may have nudged me at first but now the interest is my own. And if he chose to say nothing … which was quite possible, likely even, then I'd have to live with that. But I would have given him a chance to talk to me. Which was also a chance that I could get to know him, have some sort of relationship with him, which is something, despite growing up in the same house, I don't think I've had.

5

It was a long walk to school. Hazel was supposed to walk with me. We would set off together but Hazel's friend Bridget would be waiting for her halfway, chewing gum, blowing bubbles the size of eggs, oranges, grapefruits even, that never popped on her face the way mine did, but withered gracefully and shrank, grey and wrinkled, back into her open mouth. When Bridget was there, Hazel was completely different. Whenever they were together they talked in these stupid American accents and called me ‘kid'. ‘I'm only fifteen months younger than you,' I'd object, from behind, speaking to Hazel not Bridget, but Bridget would turn, eyes narrowed, gum snapping between her teeth. ‘But honey,' she'd say, ‘those fifteen months
count
.'

I didn't care anyway, I didn't want to walk with them. Bridget was allowed to wear shoes that were almost high-heeled and made her wiggle when she walked so that I wanted to kick her up the bum. She and Hazel would link arms and walk in step and, just before they reached the school gates, Bridget would spit her gum into someone's hedge.

My best friend, Elaine, lived in the other direction. Hardly any other children lived our way. Most families with children lived on the new estate the other side of the village. Our house was big and dark. Mummy hated it. She longed for a bright new house. ‘Where we can inscribe our own personalities on the pristine walls,' she said, ‘instead of battling against the dust of ages. A sort of architectural tabula rasa,' she added, and Daddy flapped his paper and belched in the way he did when most irritated.

Nobody lived our way, on the gloomy outskirts, separated from the village by a couple of flat, windy fields, nobody except old people. One of the houses was actually an old people's home and some were divided up into flats. Nobody I knew lived our way – until Puddle-duck arrived.

He used to appear at the end of the path that led up the side of our house to his, just as Hazel and I came out of our door every morning. I think he must have been bobbing down behind the fence, waiting, for whether we were late or early he would always step out smiling at me in a way that made my heart clench. A pleading smile. Just because I'd fetched him an Aertex shirt to cover up his dog's belly, he liked me. Hazel would ignore him, sweeping past as if he was nothing, her straight blonde hair swinging below her ears. I would smile back sometimes, but hurry past, leaving him behind.

When we met Bridget at the other side of the fields, I was supposed to drop back, but if I dropped back too much, Puddle-duck caught up with me. I couldn't stand it. ‘Oh, it's lover boy,' Bridget would shout. ‘Going steady, Grizzle?' My face would go tight and hot. At least Puddle-duck was deaf, that was a blessing. It was difficult walking far enough behind them and far enough in front of Puddle-duck. But I
couldn't
walk with him. When he said hello he sounded like a seal. If he was behind me I couldn't see him so my hardness couldn't be chipped away by the sad sight of him. Only sometimes he was close enough for me to hear the slap, slap, slap of his big feet in their plimsolls – he always wore the sort of plimsolls with stretchy elastic fronts – and sometimes I could hear him breathing too, he breathed so loudly because he couldn't hear I suppose, incorporating little squeaks and grunts.

Then, one morning over breakfast, Hazel mentioned Puddle-duck.

‘Who?' Mummy asked.

‘The boy who lives in one of the flats at the back,' Hazel said.

Mummy picked Huwie's spoon up from the floor and sat down, intrigued. ‘The little fellow who stares out of the window?' Huwie, sitting in his high-chair, threw his spoon back on to the floor and jammed a Marmite soldier into his mouth with a pudgy fist. I remember that, because suddenly I became aware that Puddle-duck had been a baby once, not as sweet and fat as Huw I'm sure, but still … a baby boy. I felt a sort of surge of compassion for him. What if everyone hated Huw when he was older like everyone hated Puddle-duck? Compassion I tried to swallow with my mouthful of egg.

‘I've often wondered about him. Have you noticed him, Ralph?'

‘Eh?' Daddy emerged from his
Daily Telegraph
and took a bite of toast. It was smothered in marmalade that he made himself, the bits of peel as thick as caterpillars. I wouldn't eat it.

‘The boy who lives at the back.'

‘Little waif. Stares from the window?'

‘That's him.' Mummy hooked a bit of egg-shell from Huwie's mouth.

‘He's in Grizzle's class,' Hazel said. I kicked her under the table.

‘His mother's that
piece
.' My mother widened her eyes at Daddy who wasn't looking.

‘Piece?' I said, but they ignored me.

‘You must invite him to tea,' Mummy said.

Hazel and I looked at each, panic stricken. Hazel was so stupid, sometimes. Couldn't she see what she was getting us into?

‘I can't,' I said.

‘No such word.'

‘I mean, I don't know him, not really. He's not my friend. He never speaks to me.'

‘He's deaf,' cut in Hazel. ‘Don't know why he wears those hideous hearing-aids, they don't do any good.'

‘How do you know? Anyway his mum makes him.' Miss Bowen was always telling Puddle-duck to put them back on or she'd write a note.

‘Poor little so-and-so.' Mummy retrieved Huwie's spoon again. ‘Invite him on Saturday. He can come to play in the garden and stay for tea.'

‘But I don't want to play with him!'

‘Do it.' Daddy folded his newspaper in quarters with the crossword on top and went off to the toilet.

‘Grizzle … if he's in that top flat, no garden … just think …' Mummy's voice was hollow with the pity of it. She stuck a final soldier into Huwie's mouth. ‘Just think of him gazing down at you children … with this lovely garden. And deaf, too.'

The next morning we didn't see Puddle-duck when we left the house. When Miss Bowen called the register he was not there and I went giddy with relief. If he was absent then I need not invite him, and if we kept quiet about Puddle-duck, if I could make Hazel keep quiet, Mummy might forget all about it. Her enthusiasms, so overwhelming when you were in the thick of them, blew over fast, like tornadoes.

At break-time, I told Elaine. ‘Blinking heck,' she said. She'd been to my house many times and knew about my mother.

‘You
come on Saturday,' I pleaded, ‘I'll tell her
he
was away and I invited you instead. We can have tea in the tree-house.' Elaine loved our tree-house and our whole untidy house and garden. Her house was on the estate, small and brand new. The front garden was just a lawn with a concrete lip round the edge, not even a wall or hedge, and the back garden was a lawn with a path straight down the middle and a rotary dryer in the middle set in a circle of cement. Our washing-line was hung loopily between trees, uneven, so that the clothes slid down towards the middle and dried all corrugated and spattered with leaves and bird-droppings. Mummy would have loved Elaine's house, every room was a neat rectangle with a big window, sort of
simple
, unlike any single room in our house.

‘Please come,' I begged.

‘Can't. We're going over to Nanny's.'

‘Can't I come?'

‘We'd never fit you in.' This was true. Elaine's father had a bubble-car that just the three of them, all fortunately slight, could squeeze into. Once Elaine's dad had driven round to pick her up from our house and Daddy, who had been clipping the hedge, had stood, arms folded, watching it drive away.

‘Messerschmitt,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Cockpit of. Fighter plane. Minus the wings.'

‘And the guns,' I added.

It wasn't until Puddle-duck was absent that I realised how aware of him I had been, how much time I had been spending day-dreaming him away. Not that I wanted anything bad to happen to him, but that his mother – the piece – and Vassily would move. Or that he would go to another school. A special school for deaf children where he'd fit in and be happy. Then everyone would be happy.

When I got home from school that afternoon, a woman in orange bell-bottoms was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea.

‘Ah, Griselda,' said Mummy, ‘this is Wanda, Vassily's mother.'

‘Hiya,' I said. She didn't look like anyone's mother to me. Her hair was a big blonde afro – I could see a greenfly trapped in its frizzy ends. She wore white patent-leather platform boots and a cheese-cloth smock over her bell-bottoms, with nothing underneath. I had to keep my eye on the greenfly struggling in her split ends for fear of glimpsing the round dark nipples that showed through the thin material. Mummy seemed not to have noticed, or, at least, not to mind. I looked affectionately at her smooth hair and her neat blue shirt-dress that covered everything so decently – even if it was spattered with Huwie's Ribena.

‘Cup of tea?' Mummy indicated the teapot. I shook my head and helped myself to a glass of water.

‘So, you're in my Vassily's class, I hear.' Wanda said.

‘Yes.' I smiled thinly at her.

‘Your mum's invited him round, Saturday.'

‘Oh good.' I went over and plucked Huwie from his high-chair. ‘I'll take him outside.'

There was a funny dull musty smell surrounding Wanda, the same smell, only fainter, that hung around Puddle-duck. Later I learned that it was patchouli oil.

‘Aren't you going to change?' Mummy said. Already Huwie had dribbled on my blazer.

‘In a bit.' Mummy gave me a look. ‘Oh all right.' I dumped Huwie on her lap.

Upstairs, I ripped off my uniform and flung it on the floor. There was no way out now. How could I play with him? I couldn't bear anyone except Elaine to know. Dressed in an old summer dress, I crept downstairs to the hall and dialled Elaine's number. We had only just had the telephone installed and were supposed to ask before we used it. If Daddy was there he stood and timed us, holding his sleeve up and gazing darkly at his wrist-watch.